“O heavens,
  If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
  Allow obedience, if yourselves are old,
  Make it your cause; send down and take my part!”

The thirty-third canto of the “Inferno” supremely exemplifies the sustaining energy of poetic imagination, that by its sublimating light it can forever hold before the mind, in tearful, irresistible beauty, one of the most woful forms of human suffering, death by starvation.  In that terrific picture, in front of which all the generations of men that come after Dante are to weep purifying tears, the most exquisite stroke is given in five monosyllables; but in those five little words what depth of pathos, what concentration of meaning!  On the fourth day one of Ugolino’s dying sons throws himself at his father’s feet, crying,—­

  “Father, why dost not help me?”

Here let me remark that it is not by witnessing, through poetically imaginative representation, scenes of suffering and agony, as in this case and the tragic drama, that the sensibilities are “purged,” according to the famous saying of Aristotle; but it is because such scenes are witnessed by the light of the beautiful.  The beautiful always purifies and exalts.

In either of these two passages any piling up of words, any hyperbole of phrase, or boldness or even grandeur of figurative speech, would have proved a hindrance instead of a conductor to the feeling, smothering and not facilitating expression.  But when, turned out of doors in “a wild night,” by those “unnatural hags,” his daughters, Lear, baring his brow to the storm, invokes the thunder to

  “Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world,”

there is no tenderness, no folding of the sore heart upon itself; there is the expansion of defiance, outburst of the mighty wrath of an outraged father and wronged and crownless king:  and so we have a gush of the grandest diction, of the most tempestuous rhythm, the storm in Lear’s mind marrying itself with a ghastly joy to the storm of the elements, the sublime tumult above echoed in the crashing splendor of the verse:—­

  “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!  Rage, blow! 
  You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
  Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! 
  You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
  Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving-thunderbolts,
  Singe my white head!  And thou, all-shaking thunder,
  Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world! 
  Crack nature’s moulds, all germins spill at once,
  That make ingrateful man!”

I know of no other single passage that exhibits so clearly the colossal dimensions of Shakespeare.  Here is attained, with almost unique effect, what according to Schiller is the aim of poetry, “no other than to give to humanity its fullest possible expression, its most complete utterance.”